There is often a need to share data among a variety of different parties. A company, for, example, may need to share data among multiple computing environments. For purposes of illustration, consider the case in which each computing environment in which data is shared corresponds to a different geographic location in the company or possibly one or more third party entities working in cooperation with the company. One way of sharing data is through the use of replicated data repositories. A replicated data repository can be provided to each third party, other company location, etc., having a need for shared data.
A data repository typically utilizes structures referred to as Access Control Lists (ACLs) to restrict access to the various artifacts included therein. Each ACL determines which users or groups of users are permitted to access the artifact to which the ACL is associated or bound within the data repository. In many cases, however, the users of each computing environment among which the replicated data repositories are shared are different. The computing environments can be said to have different user identity spaces. This can make synchronization of ACLs difficult, thereby complicating the sharing of data.